SME Server talk:Volunteering

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English

Why do we need volunteers?

For all kind of things! For one SME Server is a product made and maintained by people dedicating spare time and resources to create a secure and robust Small Enterprise server.

Skills

Any skill is useful for the SME Server project.

If you are a developer of any kind, we will find something for you to do. Even if you think that you have no Linux skills you can still help. You can tell us if and how you understand the wiki pages, or more precisely, we would like to know what pages you don't understand. Thanks to the insights of new users we can continuously enhance readability of the wiki. Please add remark to the discussion tabs of the page.

If, on a top of that, you can write, you are invaluable. We need a lot of articles. There are thousands of Linux programs around, and more are released every day. In addition, new versions of existing applications are released. There is need for a lot of hands to write about them and to keep reviews current.

Documentation

Documentation for SME Server was inherited from the prior distribution maintainers, e-smith and mitel. Their work gave SME a great base to work from.

The current developers have continued to improve the SME Server software and to reflect these improvements the Documentation has to develop too. These wiki-based manuals have been put in place to allow anyone to update or add new sections where they see fit.

The core manuals have been protected for stability, but anyone can request access to add and update howto and contrib pages to the wiki. If you've got instructions, solutions to common problems, neat tips and tricks, or just a good way to explain something, we'd love to hear from you.

Wiki Team

This page is built with MediaWiki. The concept of a Wiki is that anybody may add and modify content. On Help:Contents, find a quick tutorial if you're unfamiliar with wikis.

As long as you edit anything on the wiki you are de facto member of the Wiki Team.

To make edits, you need to log in to the wiki. In order to do this, you will need to open an account. The information that SME Server requires for opening an account is very limited and easy to do and can be found here.

After you log in, you will see a toolbar at the top of the page that is always available. There is a link in the toolbar that is labeled with your username. This takes you to your "personal page". Use this page to introduce yourself and don't be shy. Write a word or two about your interests, especially those related to SME Server and Linux. If nothing else, tell us how you learned about SME Server.

Bug and New Feature Verification

You can help improve SME Server by finding and reporting bugs. This helps us to make our software as reliable as possible.

Our bug tracking system, Bugzilla, is used for all SME Server Linux products. If you have never written a bug report, please refer to Bugzilla Help to learn what kinds of information make the report most useful. Your role in that is to report possible bugs only via the bug tracker, and to encourage others to do the same. Refer again to Bugzilla Help for helping with bug fixing and verification, the best way to learn is to fix other peoples' problems.

	Tip:
	For an easier way to see new bug or new activity you can look at Bugzilla_Reports Troubleshooter : There's a lot that non-coders can do to help in the bug tracker to improve bug report quality. We need help in making sure that bug reports are clear, that observations are fully collected, are separated from speculation and attempted workarounds, relevant log files are checked....

Programming

The most obvious way, for programmers, to participate in the development of SME Server is to post a patch as a suggested solution to an existing bug in Bugzilla. Each package has a maintainer, who will contact you to discuss your proposed solution. You may want to join our development mailing lists before you start coding in order to discuss your plans and coordinate with other developers.

For more information about getting source code and building your own packages, read the SME Server:Documentation:Developers Manual.

	Tip:
	If you would like to help or to learn about SME Server 9 you should look at SME_Server_9.0_Development or the Category:SME9-Development

Languages

A new system translation interface has been installed to facilitate translations of SME Server core packages as well as SME Server contribs, for more information have a look at the Translations page. The translation framework is located at http://translate.contribs.org.

Donations

Donate and help SME Server and contribs.org pay it's bills, pay a developer to add a feature you would like, email a developer directly with your request or open a bug with your proposal.

Contribute

There is an active community in the forum that help all levels of SME Server users. Please have a look at the forum for an overview at http://forums.contribs.org

Suggestions

Visit the New Feature Request (NFR) page in the bug tracker and add your suggestion.

Only software with an OSI-compliant open-source license will be added to the SME Server project.

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